Harriet Ann Jacobs

Now celebrated for her classic slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Harriet Ann Jacobs (b. 1813–d. 1897) was an abolitionist, educator, and advocate for former slaves during and after the American Civil War. Born in Edenton, North Carolina, to enslaved parents Delilah and Elijah, Jacobs learned to read and write from her mistress Margaret Horniblow. On the latter’s death in 1825 Harriet Jacobs and her brother John Swanson Jacobs entered the household of Dr. James Norcom who for the next four years subjected her to intense sexual harassment. Finally in 1829, after Norcom refused an offer of sale from Jacobs’s free Black lover, she engaged in a sexual affair with Norcom’s white neighbor Samuel Tredwell Sawyer. Here she gambled that Sawyer’s affections might lead him to purchase her, and though she expressed great shame in Incidents regarding this stratagem, she argued against judging enslaved women who only sought to protect themselves. In 1835 after the birth of son Joseph and daughter Louisa, Jacobs hid in the attic space of her grandmother’s house, tricking Norcom into believing she had fled North. Assuming Jacobs was entirely out of reach, Norcom sold the children and their uncle John Swanson Jacobs to a slave trader with whom Sawyer was secretly in league. Sawyer purchased all three. With her family safe now from Norcom, Jacobs finally escaped to New York in 1842, seven years after going into hiding. Once North, Jacobs reunited with her children and brother, only to find herself in danger yet again with the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. Though Norcom was now dead, his daughter pursued Jacobs, until white friends arranged for her purchase in 1852. Finally free and with national tensions rising over the question of slavery, Jacobs published her life story as Incidents in 1861, under the pseudonym “Linda Brent” and with the aid of Lydia Maria Child. For the next five years she traveled with the now adult Louisa, performing relief work among displaced ex-slaves in Washington, DC, Alexandria, Virginia, and Savannah, Georgia. In 1867, after a failed attempt to raise funds in Britain to aid freed people, Jacobs faced dwindling financial resources. For the rest of their lives Jacobs and Louisa struggled to support themselves. At times they took in boarders, sold homemade preserves, or in Louisa’s case took short-lived teaching and clerical jobs. Harriet Jacobs died in 1897 and is buried in Boston’s Auburn Cemetery.